Review of civil engineering applications with distributed optical fiber sensors

It’s widely recognized that during its lifetime, civil engineering structures are subjected to adverse changes that affect their condition and structural safety. In this way, the application of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems to these civil engineering structures has been a developing studied and practiced topic, that has allowed for a better understanding of structures’ conditions and increasingly lead to a more cost-effective management of those infrastructures. In this field, the use of fiber optic sensors has been studied, discussed and practiced with encouraging results. The possibility of understanding and monitor the distributed behavior of extensive stretches of critical structures it’s an enormous advantage that distributed fiber optic sensing provides to SHM systems. In the past decade, several R&D works have been performed with the goal of improving the knowledge and developing new techniques associated with the application of DOFS in order to widen the range of applications of these sensors and also to obtain more correct and reliable data. This paper presents, after a brief introduction to DOFS, the latest developments related with the improvement of these products as long as a review of their diverse applications on structural health monitoring with special focus on engineering structures.